My pants are too short. This pisses me off, because I’ve only had them for a few months and I paid a ridiculous shipping fee to have them sent here. I cannot seem to find good work clothing here; for one thing it’s extremely difficult to find trousers that fit me (not only is there the height issue, but they are usually expecting me to have a defined waist, and I don’t). In general there don’t seem to be many high quality professional work clothes for women here. (Maybe that makes sense, since I recently read that less than 10% of Dutch women work full-time.) I can’t seem to find things that are well made for a reasonable price; they have lots of fashionable stuff that lasts for maybe one year but I don’t particularly want things that are shoddy, ruffly, low-necked, and / or transparent. Also, for some reason, innovative fabrics seem to be a peculiarly American thing; they don’t really seem to have button down shirts that stretch and are wrinkle-free (or even wrinkle-more-or-less-free).
So I order from the US, and apparently my Dutch washing machine and dryer resent this. I had hoped that the pants would lengthen as I wore them (sometimes newly-washed pants seem short because they’re tight around the thighs until they loosen up a bit) but no such luck. This may be why a much lower percentage of clothing here says that it can be machine-dried. (Interestingly, a higher percentage is machine-washable, even including things like lined dresses.)
On the rowing front, I’m not so sure this marathon training is going well. The problem is that, without an actual marathon in my future, it’s hard to keep motivated. And also, I’m tired. Of course that’s what is supposed to happen during endurance training, but I am not convinced my endurance is going up as rapidly as the meters in my workout. I’m also tired of wasted weekends; lately I’ve been doing a long erg workout (well, lately around 12km, which shouldn’t really feel all that long) on Saturday and a row on Sunday, which means I don’t have time or energy to do anything fun on weekends. Of course, that’s not helped when it seems like half of our weekends are either spend recovering from travel or preparing for the next trip! Still, we’re in the middle of a month where neither of us have to travel, so I think I’m going to need to declare time off.
After all, since I’m not training for anything in particular, there’s no rush to get there.
I did notice one nice thing about my upcoming travel. I’m expecting to have four international trips from the last half of August through the end of October; dates for one aren’t finalized yet, but as far as I can tell, none of them are over the High Holy Days. It’s not like I’d be going to synagogue anyway, but there is something especially forlorn about being on your own in a distant country on a major holiday for you. (On the other hand, two of those trips are to the US, and being in either my house or my parents’ house on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur wouldn’t be bad at all.)
Stinks about your pants. I never thought about how the availability and selection of women’s professional clothing is in ratio to how many woman want/need such clothes, but of course it makes sense. Frustating for you though. Hope you can get some shopping done when you’re next stateside.
As for training without an actual event to prepare for must be so, so, so tough. My fitness goals are more modest, but I find it a real slog at times to be chugging along in the name of maintaining bone density. I win by something NOT happening, a dubious reward at best. ~LA